The revolution began in 2010, when Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg gave what has become one of the most popular TED Talks ever, about an age-old subject: the scarcity of women in boardrooms and corner offices everywhere.

What made the talk groundbreaking instead of same-old is that Sandberg didn’t trot out the usual warhorses as reasons — she might say “excuses” — for this phenomenon. The lack of female leadership wasn’t so much about systemic biases or glass ceilings or Old Boys clubs.

No, she suggested that what stops women at the doors of power has to do with women themselves — too often women in the corporate world simply “took their foot off the gas” or questioned their own ability and credibility, and prevented themselves from stepping through that door to the other side.

Sandberg urged women instead to “lean in.”

The huge notice her talk has attracted — and not all of it positive — has led Sandberg to write Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, a book that may become a movement if she, and Facebook, have anything to do with it.

The book is a quick read — fewer than 300 pages — and I promise you its few words will nudge you into considering all those gazillions of times you literally and figuratively took a back seat.

A million years ago I remember having lunch with a good friend, an older woman who was the publisher of a fashion industry trade magazine. She’d just gone through performance reviews with her team and she told me of the stark difference between the female ad sales people she dealt with and the male. The women, she said, were usually doing a far better job but in those reviews politely accepted the standard terms and cost of living raises without argument. The men all negotiated, and won, better terms. One in particular stood out — he was a total dud as a salesperson and told her the reason for it was that he wasn’t paid enough, needed the support of an assistant and required an extra bonus in order to meet his numbers.

I took her point, or so I thought — don’t be so polite that you underestimate your own worth. Maybe don’t be a jerk about it.

All these years later, this same observation of the male-female difference in business is the nugget within Lean In. And despite learning the lesson early, and despite all the experience I have accumulated since then, I have been reflecting on the numerous times I nonetheless didn’t speak up, raise my hand, or lean in.

I am considered feisty. I’ve been around the block a few times. Me, timid? Certainly not. And if even a feisty one such as I tends to demur when it comes to making an argument for myself can you imagine what happens to the nicer girls?

These failures of confidence haunt me. There is the time I agreed to a contract without negotiating the money I really felt was right, because I didn’t want to offend the bossy boss who was offering it. But the failure to stand up for myself was insidious — it made me angry at myself, at him, at the company; it ate at me and counted against me in the long run, as he then identified me as a bit junior, a bit of a pushover, not a contender for the much bigger job that came up shortly after my contract was finished. Then paradoxically there are all the times I’ve felt wretched about not being “nice enough.”

Sandberg suggests the failure to be forceful when necessary and the fear of being seen as “not nice” are the twin demons holding us back.

Sandberg is a powerhouse, and yet she admits freely in her book that she has also failed to “lean in.” This is strangely comforting, and is the real power of the book. It makes our own lack of confidence seem a bit more normal, less a handicap and more of something that simply needs to be overcome.

Sandberg’s point of view is controversial — more traditional feminists say she gives short shrift to the real issues women face; others say she’s in a rarefied position of having enough money to be able to staff up at home so that she can “have it all.”

She expected all that. “My hope is that this book is not the end of the conversation, but the beginning,” she writes, and urges people to continue the discussion via the Lean In Community on, where else, Facebook. (www.facebook.com/leaninorg )

Her book is a kind of “face the fear and do it anyway” call to action, a refreshing suggestion that the only thing between us and success is our own doubting selves. There may indeed be an Old Boys network and a glass ceiling stopping you from getting ahead, Sandberg says. But don’t let one of the obstacles be yourself.

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